Reasonable Accommodation: The Supreme Court Case That Will Decide Whether Or Not Mentally Ill Lives Matter

This is a well-written piece about an ongoing civil rights tragedy ion America: police killing mentally ill people reagrdless of actual threat to anyone. It could well be argued that in the police – mentally ill encounters, the police are the far more dangerous of the two, the far more likely to kill. We can do better and must. This piece describes an important Supreme Court case about this issue.

There are no surer guarantors of the extraordinary than a story which is prefaced by a explanation of how ordinary things had seemed in its beginning. Ask survivors of the attacks on the World Trade Center or Pearl Harbor to describe their experience and they will almost invariably comment on how it started out as a day like any other. And yet, the details of those unremarkable few seconds or minutes before the arrival of the catastrophic become seared in their memory—tattooed on the undersides of their eyelids so that they can’t help but see them as they try to sleep. We remember these things in part because we hardwired to do so, our brains being designed to experience more cellular activity in the centers for emotional processing during negative events—but also because it provides a necessary contrast from the horror and trauma of what we endured shortly thereafter. It…

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3 comments

Think it is good that you wrote about this – althou very sad to read and think one of the main problems here is having amed police – even a taser might have althou painful been better than the police killing a disabled person with depression and anxiety.

If you could rerun this situation and you were the staff person concerned enough to enter this patients room – what do you think would have worked better?

I wonder, perhaps this staff person needs a lot more training especially in empathy and access to resources other than police when they feel conerned for someone living in assisted accomodation. Could they first have phoned a mental health professional, a doctor or a clinical psycologist – anyone who could talk to the person, even through a locked door and to respect their need for a space to call their own

The failure to me seems to be us – and as you introduced this – lack of resouces in the community.

Hope the court case brings about changes. Perhaps you can see that it does by advocating somehow for this person – in your professional role.

If you have an agitated person with a harmless weapon offering herself no risk, keep some distance, monitor. It might work itself out, and making it worse is generally worse than doing nothing. Those cops showed no ability or willingness to deal with the situation safely, completely unacceptable if they do handle such situations as often as the article describes. From my perspective, and given what the article describes, it was not a particularly difficult situation if handles with even less than average ability. The use of weapons, to me, indicates people with dangerously poor judgement, likely to continue to kill as matters stand, especially if they manage, as is generally the case, to evade any real consequences. Nursing staff who as much as punched this poor lady would be fired in short order without due process. Police have managed to escape from such accountability, and Americans die as a result in large numbers every year.

Thankyou. With your experience and knowledge perhaps there is some way you could input into this case. Wonder why some mental health service support wasnt called first to ask for advice how to handle this and also wonder what training the person had who looks after people in assisted accomodation.

Seems to me an investigation into all the things that failed in this case should happen and changes made. If someone was depressed and sitting on a ledge somewhere, im hoping someone would attempt to talk them down – seems no attempt was made to understand what this person was going through or to resolve in a way, that though it would have taken more time, would have had a much better outcome.